Imagekind sold to CafePress

Imagekind, an online art and poster site that also offers customized framing services, has agreed to be sold to CafePress for $15 million to $20 million in cash and stock, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Zazzle, a CafePress competitor that is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and others, also was aggressively bidding for Imagekind. Art.com also was interested, but they were not part of the recent negotiations.

Imagekind decided to sell because both CafePress and Zazzle were moving into the online framing business.

The company is led by Kevin Saliba, a former Expedia executive. It was originally incubated by Curious Office Partners, a Seattle angel investment firm founded by Adrian Hanauer and Kelly Smith.

Imagekind is an online community where people buy and sell original artwork. Artists upload digital prints to the site, setting the price for the artwork beyond a base price from Imagekind for printing and paper costs.

In March, the startup said it was featuring artwork from more than 50,000 photographers, painters and illustrators, some of whom were on pace to make more than $60,000 a year from sales on the site. According to Compete.com, Imagekind’s traffic had leveled off at about 100,000 visitors per month. Visits dipped slightly in the month of June to 336,000. But for the year they were up more than 450 percent.

UPDATE: Imagekind CEO Kevin Saliba confirms the deal in a blog post, noting that the business will continue to operate as a separate brand. He writes:

With this announcement, we have effectively gone from a quickly growing online marketplace to the market leader. Your work will now be visible to a continually growing number of CafePress members (more than 6.5 million worldwide). This will undoubtedly offer you greater awareness than ever before and, ultimately, greater art sales.

UPDATE: In an interview, Saliba said that the company decided to sell now because CafePress is the leader in print-on-demand services. (Best known for its customized T-shirts) And he said there’s an opportunity to grow the Imagekind business faster with CafePress, which already offers a poster and framing business on its Web site.

“We think this puts a lot of accelerant on the fire and we can become a much larger and formidable consumer brand, especially in the art space with CafePress’ backing,” he said.

Imagekind employs 26 people in Seattle and Portland, with plans to add a few new employees in the coming months. Saliba declined to say whether the company was profitable, but he said the business has grown in terms of revenue, traffic and artists every month. He declined to offer revenue or traffic figures.

But he did say that more than 50,000 artists have contributed more than one million pieces of artwork to the community. The average framed artwork sale on the site is $126, with some orders surpassing $1,000. It also offers customized greeting cards for as little $3.

“We often internally joke that we are an old school Web company, because we are actually selling a product and making money,” he said.

Saliba declined to comment about Zazzle’s interest, but he did confirm that there were other interested parties.